Campaigners fear another missed opportunity to mend a broken care system
8 min read
It was presented as landmark legislation, but as the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill enters the Lords Justine Smith finds campaigners scrambling to prevent what they fear is doomed to become another missed opportunity to mend a broken system
From his birth until his second birthday, Bruno spent most of his waking moments in terror. From downstairs came the clamour and chaos of domestic violence and addiction. His bedroom was full of only darkness, cold, thirst and hunger. Nobody came when he cried so he stopped crying.
Since being taken into care, his kinship arrangement has broken down. Now 16, he has been through eight different emergency foster homes, ill-equipped to deal with his complex needs, and a £10,000 per week unregistered children’s home. Most recently, Bruno has been expelled from school, criminally exploited into county lines gangs and addicted to strong cannabis; after all of this, he was moved to a secure children’s home hundreds of miles away from his family and friends.
“Bruno was let down by every agency charged with his corporate care as his teenage birth parents had been before him,” his kinship carer tells The House. “Despite the amount of money spent on him, the number of people working with him, and us doing our best to hold him and fight for him, we watched helplessly as he fell through one gap after another.”
Bruno’s story reflects a fractured, underfunded care system: poor safeguarding, trauma-unaware schools, a foster care crisis, unsupported kinship carers and adopters, and an unregulated market where profit too often trumps children’s needs.
Announcing the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill in December, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said the “landmark” reforms would “bring everybody together” to keep young people safe and stop them falling through the cracks.
Headline-grabbing measures include breakfast clubs, lower uniform costs, curbs on the profiteering draining council budgets, homeschooling regulations and extending safeguarding duties to a wider range of agencies.
But campaigners, carers and care-experienced people say the bill falls short of the system reset needed to tackle inequality. Many question whether children’s care should sit with the Department for Education at all.
Labour MP Helen Hayes, chair of the Education Select Committee, says: “When we look at the data, it is absolutely dire, and it should shame all of us.” Speaking at the One Voice Summit in London, convened by Fatima Whitbread to push for change beyond the bill, she adds: “This is a good start but there is far more to be done. I keep telling the government, if you’re serious about homelessness, criminal justice or education access, we have to focus on care experience.”
Her proposed amendments include a national offer for care leavers to break the post-care postcode lottery, mental health screening from the moment a child enters care and greater support for access to higher education and stable housing.
The bill leans heavily towards education: 40 measures relate to schools; 28 to care. Education is mentioned 302 times, care 175. Fostering and adoption are almost entirely absent. Kinship carers gain limited rights, but only in select cases.
Katharine Slocombe of Adoption UK says: “These are piecemeal policies, emergency measures to improve safeguarding and education which were rushed through and we understand adoption was left out intentionally. We don’t think that’s acceptable. The government made a manifesto commitment on adoption and missed this opportunity.”
The charity plans to table an amendment for an immediate review of adoption support, which it says varies wildly across the country and often vanishes as adoptees age. Sixty per cent of adopters say they’re struggling and seven per cent are close to breakdown. Among kinship carers, one in eight say they are at breaking point, most citing the pressure of managing children’s intense emotional and mental health needs.
Last month, the Department for Education nearly halved individual therapy pots under the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund, a vital resource for many.
“The left hand doesn’t seem to know what the right hand is doing. That lack of coherence in the overall strategy is something we are growing increasingly concerned about,” says Slocombe.
Research shows that for every 100 well-supported kinship carers taxpayers save £4m and the lifetime earnings of those children increases by £2m. Yet 85 per cent of the 141,000 kinship carers step in informally and receive no financial or practical support. Their children often miss out on therapy and educational help.
Lib Dem MP Munira Wilson’s proposals to extend pupil premium and financial allowances to all kinship families were rejected. “Why are we not treating all children equally?” she asked. “The trauma and needs are the same.”
Sam Turner of Kinship welcomes the reforms but says: “Provision for kinship care is weak. Chronic financial insecurity in these families is worse than in any other group raising children. The needs and experiences of all children unable to live with their parents are more similar than different, yet the system separates them based on how they entered care.”
The bill takes aim at the dysfunctional residential care market, long dominated by private equity and even Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, as exposed by this magazine, by tightening oversight, expanding Ofsted’s powers to fine poor providers, curbing offshore profit extraction and fast-tracking not-for-profit operators. It stops short of capping or eliminating profits, as Scotland has done and Wales is attempting.
Regional care co-operatives, currently being piloted in two areas, will be rolled out to let councils pool resources and draw up integrated strategies so they collaborate instead of compete to provide appropriate, local placements.
Children’s care charity Become wants a national strategy to build local capacity and keep children close to their communities, instead of sending them miles away as private providers cluster in cheaper areas.
The bill includes a new discretionary “staying close” package to let young people in residential care stay until 25, but campaigners worry this could widen regional disparities.
Fostered young people won’t get the same extension after the government rejected an amendment in favour of prioritising those in residential care. Currently, teens leave foster care at 18 but can stay on until 21, or until they finish higher education or training, under a ‘staying put’ arrangement. Campaigners would like to see that rise to 25 for all foster children.
The Fostering Network warns that this overlooks the major challenges foster leavers face. Extending their time in family homes, it says, would improve outcomes and save councils £84m in five years.
It also wants a national foster carer register and minimum allowance to help reverse a major drop in carers. A third of local authorities pay below the national minimum wage.
In five years, England has lost 5,000 foster carers, while the number of children needing care has risen by the same amount. Ofsted says half of children in care homes could be in foster care – which is not only better for many, but five times cheaper.
Ultimately, of course, it all comes down to money and in this new era of austerity, everyone working in the sector fears that meaningful change cannot happen while the public purse is clamped shut.
England spends 10 per cent less of its GDP on children’s education, welfare, social care and health as its Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) counterparts and would need a £20bn boost to reach parity.
Rachel Allison, public affairs manager at Action for Children, says: “The government must commit to at least £2.6bn of extra funding to fully address this crisis as set out in the Independent Care Review three years ago.”
Whitbread tells The House: “My children’s home was hard – there wasn’t much of anything to go around. But in some ways it is even worse today. The system is setting young people up for failure and adding to their trauma. The government must put young people’s voices front-and-centre of policy and back up its stated commitment with funding and a coherent plan, not a patchwork of minor adjustments.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “This government inherited a children’s social care system failing to meet the needs of the country’s most vulnerable children and is now delivering the biggest overhaul of the system in a generation.
“The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes tens of measures to drive up standards and outcomes for children in care and care leavers, ranging from making sure all children in the care system can get the support of virtual school heads to improve their attendance and school outcomes, to extending support for all care leavers with housing and jobs to the age of 25.
“As part of our Plan for Change, we are also doubling council funding for early family intervention, giving thousands more families the support of a specialist worker who can co-ordinate the help they need, from parenting to mental health or addiction, improving children’s life chances.”
